Baseball is Fun
Out of all the many things we need to explain to non-fans about the game of baseball, “the game is fun” should not be on the list. It’s assumed that baseball must be fun. It has been around for over a century. Lots of people like it. That’s what I tell myself until I sit through a Major League Baseball game. The longer the game goes and the more muted reactions I experience from players and fans alike the more I’m reminded that it’s really easy for fans to be exposed to the MLB brand of baseball and come away thinking that baseball is a very staid and boring sport.
Instead of harping on the often boring nature of MLB, we’re going to instead focus on the leagues and players that show how much fun baseball can be. Players from these leagues have been trickling into MLB for years now and the culture of MLB has been very slowly changing as a result. However, the leagues those players originate from have been fun for a long time now and within a few minutes of viewing the action, people should recall why they became fans of baseball in the first place.
First and foremost: the excitement train is powered by emotion. I’m not just referring to the emotion from the players but from the fans as well. Asian and Latin American leagues are chock full of emotion and it makes the games so much fun. Players showboat, they flip their bats, they strut after big strikeouts, and so on and so forth. The fans in turn have cheers they perform, are constantly making noise, and become more and more amped as the players do the same.
Emotion is great, but the next factor that unaffiliated leagues have going for them is the style of baseball being played. Sabermetrics, analytics, or wherever you want to call it are present in the unaffiliated leagues but they haven’t taken over quite yet. What does that mean for the person watching the games? It means that in pretty much every league you get to see action moments. Action moments can be anything from the hit and run to bunting for a base hit. They are, as aptly described, the moments that provide the action during a ballgame. There are still plenty of home runs, but there’s not really three true outcome baseball. I don’t know about you, but I’ll take watching runners steal bases over waiting around four innings for another home run to be hit every day of the week.
Last, but not least, parity plays a big role in unaffiliated leagues being fun. Let’s be honest folks, we know every single year that it will be a small number of six or so teams in MLB that are actual contenders while the rest of the league isn’t even trying to compete. In unaffiliated leagues, you are often dealing with leagues that are much smaller in terms of the number of teams or lack any sort of contract restrictions beyond a given season. What that means is that if Templiers de Sénart have finally gotten tired of Huskies de Rouen winning France’s Division 1 title every year, they can go hog wild and sign every single player they possibly want the next year, including players on the Huskies. Teams having the ability and drive to improve their teams on a yearly basis makes for plenty of competition and rivalries within the leagues.
To say that MLB has become rote and boring is an understatement. It’s one of the main reasons I stopped watching the league. Baseball itself isn’t boring though, it is fun through and through. Watch some off-beat baseball sometime soon and remind yourself of how much fun it can really be.
-Bill Thompson
